Patch 5.2 interview with Dave Kosak
Inside an old alt's vault
The latest patch 5.2 news
All of the latest Mists of Pandaria newsGold Capped: What we didn't learn at BlizzCon
by Fox Van Allen 
Nov 4th 2011 at 5:30PM
Honest, guys, I tried my best. I was there at BlizzCon 2011. I got up and in line at the Q&A panels, determined to ask the Blizzard development team questions about the game's economy.
Ultimately, I was foiled by a bunch of dudes who wasted our time offering shout-outs to their guild (and by my own poor planning of not getting in line two hours before the panel started). But I digress. The fact of the matter is that there's a lot of stuff wrong with the World of Warcraft economy and Auction House. Issues that need to be addressed in the next expansion to promote a fair and level playing field, something WoW has lacked ... well, something the game has lacked for years.
So, if I did get the chance to stand up and ask a question of a Q&A panel, what would it have been? Well, after I wasted everyone's time thanking you, the readers (Booooo! No one cares about the readers! Booooooooooooooooo!), I'd have asked one of these three.
Fix the damn thing already
Since the new Pet Battle system will result in more players using the Auction House, are there any plans to improve the default Auction House user interface?
Simply put, if you're using the default UI, you are at a severe disadvantage against those who use add-ons. It's true, regardless of whether you're buying or selling.
At the very least, we need some basic sorting options that are sorely missing at the moment. We need an ability to search by price per unit to quickly find the best-priced items, even if they're listed in unusual quantities. We need an Auction House that consolidates identical listings. (That is, if someone lists 200 pieces of Whiptail one at a time, all at 2g a piece, the auction house should consolidate these on a single line so that buyers don't need to click through 10 pages of nuisance auctions.) We need an ability to quickly buy multiple auctions. We need, essentially, everything that Auctionator does that makes it a must-have addon.
Think it can't happen? World of Warcraft frequently takes popular must-have addons and integrates them into the game. It happened with Quest Helper. Heck, Blizzard is even working to include most of WoWhead into the game, including boss strategies.
This change is long overdue.
New dailies?
Think it can't happen? World of Warcraft frequently takes popular must-have addons and integrates them into the game. It happened with Quest Helper. Heck, Blizzard is even working to include most of WoWhead into the game, including boss strategies.
This change is long overdue.
New dailies?
Can we expect to see any new profession-specific dailies in Mists of Pandaria?
I will admit, I don't always do my cooking, fishing, and jewelcrafting dailies. Still, I'd argue that they're a huge success. Jewelcrafting dailies make the profession feel more fun. They're not required to make money; they just create an alternate route for doing so. In fact, I'd love to see Blizzard take the next step with jewelcrafting dailies in patch 5.0 by having them award skill-ups on completion like the cooking and fishing dailies. And further, I'd love to see other professions get dailies as well.
How could this work? Well, instead of having players grind through to Twilight Highlands to access those few initial epic recipes or patterns, have players complete a week's worth of dailies. This will eliminate the urge to be the first to level 90 and [Your Profession Here] 600, giving those auctioneers with a life the ability to compete (somewhat) with those who spend the first 30 hours of a new expansion playing non-stop without bathroom breaks. Yikes.
The new dailies could behave similarly to jewelcrafting dailies. Tailors and leatherworkers could have to create garments or find a special type of quest-only cloth/leather. Scribes could be asked to perform a quest similar to the one offered by their Forged Documents item. Herbalists might be asked to perform their skill on certain quest mobs or gather certain quantities of weeds growing around Stormwind or Orgrimmar. These quests would give players a terrific new route to leveling their professions (especially those poor leatherworkers stuck on low-population servers), give level-capped players something to do, and give Blizzard another opportunity to do what it does best: be creative.
... and finally ...
Can you please, please, please fix leatherworking?
Pretty please?
... and finally ...
Can you please, please, please fix leatherworking?
Pretty please?
Maximize your profits with more advice from Gold Capped. Do you have questions about selling, reselling, and building your financial empire on the auction house? Fox and Basil are taking your questions at fox@wowinsider.com and basil@wowinsider.com.
Filed under: Economy, BlizzCon, Gold Capped, Mists of Pandaria
Reader Comments (Page 2 of 3)
Claire Nov 4th 2011 9:10PM
Man, imagine if every time I got some random BOE item, I could immediately find out if someone on my server was willing to pay more than the vendor value for it? And imagine if other people on my server could know that I want the "worthless" Bloodscale Whatever of the Whatever so they should PUT IN ON THE GODDAMN AH INSTEAD OF VENDORING IT GAAAAAAH.
Ahem.
Steve H Nov 4th 2011 11:13PM
Shadenfreude!
That's a GREAT idea. It makes sense to me, they could put it in the auction house or on the Hero's Call Board, like a real server community message board. You could put pre-planned raids on there too (like old content for transmogs, the WOTLK stuff you need people for) to gather a sense of community in server that is lost these days. Just musing.
Poltergeist Nov 5th 2011 2:24AM
If I still had an active account, I would try to post this on the official suggestion forums and get the Wow Insider community behind this idea.
wow Nov 4th 2011 6:02PM
Frankly they need to fix levelling Jewelcrafting add Engineering too.
Noyou Nov 4th 2011 7:24PM
I think those 2 and alchemy are 3 of the easier professions to level. You just have to farm the ore. With JC and Eng. you can get so many skill ups from using the rocks you get while farming. The problem would be if you were buying all your mats.
Gaurisk Nov 4th 2011 10:10PM
I'm leveling an Engineer now. Bronze Frameworks and Target Dummies can go right to hell.
I need leather to make them. I need leather to make the frigging goggles. I don't have an 85 on that server, so I'm fishing in pools for junkboxes instead of doing quests to get the mats that Mining won't provide.
saturnnfoxx Nov 6th 2011 7:52PM
@ Gaurisk To solve that problem I made my engineer a skinner. There's enough miners amongst my alts that the ore wasn't an issue. Plus the miners in my guild don't mind helping out if I need extra ore and bars.
Quidamtyra Nov 4th 2011 6:04PM
First off... I LOVE Auctionator... it is the only AH addon I use and I don't really "play" the AH all that much. Once in a while I'll do some buy-low-sell-high shenanigans, but other than that, just using Auctionator to buy the required mats for raids has saved me tons of gold.
Also, LW since stacking haste drums and shaman in the group of rogues was a must. I leveled it during BC and I really don't ever want to drop it, but there's really nothing in it for me aside from buying ridiculously priced patterns for my completionist mentality. The cheap leg enchants and the cheap (and really good) bracer enchants are all well and good, but they equate to the same stat bonuses of other professions but there's no steady flow of income for LW (BS,Tailoring, also) as there is for say Enchanting, JC and Alchemy.
llcjay2003 Nov 4th 2011 8:16PM
BS and tailoring make good money, it is just in a different way. Since BS requires Chaos Orbs and tailoring has a cooldown on Dreamcloth production, the price for these items is high. Where JC, enchanting, and alchemy all will net you a large volume of "smaller" sales, BS and tailoring produce a smaller volume of "larger" sales.
On a side note, in my opinion, making orbs unbound will negatively affect BS as well as making LW suck even more.
Reservoir Nov 4th 2011 6:13PM
The best way to fix leatherworking is to make skinning built-in, so you're not required to pay an arm and a leg to make crafts at a meagre profit. Together with BoE chaos orbs, very few people will waste chaos orbs on LW crafts rather than selling them for better money.
As for dailies, I just want an arch daily. Having to fly over 2-4 continents to get vendor trash in order to level a skill that promises, well not much really, is just not worth the time. In the time it takes me to skill up arch, I could be prospecting thousands of ores and making a lot more gold with considerable less effort.
zEagleEye` Nov 4th 2011 6:57PM
@ Reservoir
Ohhhh yesssss.
I got to the point of not even learning Arch on any new toon I make.
I tried it when it just came out and I think it may be a good way to torture people but not to entertain them (unless they have masochistic tendencies).
LW is a pain, BS is a pain, still learning about Tailoring so I can't voice an opinion yet.
Building skinning into LW will only work if another profession is allowed then (just to make sure there is no misunderstanding), and even then LW is a pain.
I have skinning on my LW toons and the problem is not only the supply - there is no real demand but there IS competition ... A good recipe for losses coin-wise.
@ Schandefreude
I could not agree more about needing a reverse AH too, where we can post WTB with a target price. I think it would also help crafting people to make per need instead of having to guess and raise AH price to cover for the wrong guesses and wasted effort / mats.
Can also have 2 prices similar to the ones in use now - one for a sure sale (equivalent to the BUY price) and a higher one to sell at the time limit if nobody went LOWER than your price (equivalent to the BID price).
@ Fox,
Good article (as usual).
Personally I still use Auctioneer because when I tried Auctionator and/or Auctioneer there was no option of price per unit. Price per unit is ESSENTIAL.
If there is a way to do it now please let me know how (if it's really simple maybe I just tried it too early in the design stage).
Tirrimas Nov 4th 2011 9:52PM
@zEagleEye: The Price per unit is on the Buy tab.
Honestly, I MUCH prefer Auctionator over Auctioneer now. I LOVE being able to create Shopping Lists (one for Cata Herbs, one for Inks, etc). Being able to rapid-fire buyout auctions really is a godsend. Auctionator gathers up all the same-size and same-price auctions together, puts 'em in a pile, and asks you how many you want.
Twill Nov 4th 2011 6:29PM
Hopefully the Monks (who wear leather) will be able to help Leather Working...
Arbolamante Nov 4th 2011 6:30PM
Scribes need something new to sell, with glyphs being permanent
One word -- tattoos.
Noyou Nov 4th 2011 7:24PM
You mean like relics? /ducks.
llcjay2003 Nov 4th 2011 7:45PM
I like where you are going with this, but tattoos would be like shirts--no one sees them. Besides, personally, I keep zoomed out at around max on the game camera so if I had a tattoo, I would never see it. Sort of like my hair.
Cricket Nov 4th 2011 6:38PM
I really wish they'd do something about the disparity between gathering and crafting professions. Either fold the appropriate gathering into the crafting profession or make gathering professions secondary so every toon can collect ALL THE THINGS to their hearts' content.
And dailies for all! It would give the professions more of a progression feeling than just scrambling to get to 600 and then wonder what you're even supposed to do with that.
Hih Nov 4th 2011 6:55PM
Actually, I wouldn't really mind that at all. Then they wouldn't have to psuedo-balance the gathering professions' bonuses to claim that the crit offered by skinning is totally equal to the int/agil/str/stam offered by everything else. It would let people just do what they want to do rather than worry about profession bonuses or keeping gathering professions on a pally, dk, or druid for the increased gathering speed (mount-wise, either through increased travel speed or shortened mounting time).
llcjay2003 Nov 4th 2011 8:01PM
Dailies for all, yes. All gathering professions for everyone, no. However, I would be very interested to see the supply side of things if everyone could gather. Part of me says that it would flood the market, but the other part of me thinks that people would simply not rely on alts to gather anymore so it would not spike supply by a substantial amount.
The difference would be the competition for gathering. For example, if someone, who is not a consistent gatherer, is questing or doing a daily or whatever and they stumble upon a mining node, they will likely take it and potentially take it away from someone who mines for a living. This would directly impact the ability of a professional gatherer to make gold. Since this person can only make gold from the raw materials they collect, having everyone else be able to cut into this market would seriously limit their earning potential.
Of course, if they were able to choose another profession while keeping their gathering one, this would solve their problem. However, there are plenty of people who gather for gold simply because they do not like dealing with a production profession. During an expansion, the demand for items that a production profession can make changes with each patch, but the demand for raw materials will always be there and is usually consistent.
So basically, I do not think that their choice for making gold should be eliminated.
andres.dc39 Nov 4th 2011 7:09PM
Oh yeah. LW is the worst proffession IMO in terms of leveling. It is awful. I'm relieved my guild has a healthy amount of them.